This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

It was a dark and dreary night. I had a strange relationship with that word these days, night. It was the time of business and teaching. Darkness might cast shadows over every face, but our inhuman eyes saw well enough by the light of the stars alone. It lent everything a strange, liminal sort of flavor. The soft darkness made every interaction feel intimate, as if your small group were the only humans in the world. The sheer size of the sect added to the effect. When a cultivator could cross miles in minutes, there was no real reason to put buildings within a hundred feet of each other save for the convenience of outer disciples.

But even the magic of cultivation couldn’t make sitting alone in the darkness less lonely. I sat at my desk, poring over papers by candlelight. I’d shuttered the windows, to keep out prying eyes, leaving my candle the sole source of light in the room. The guttering flame cast strange shadows through the space as it flickered. All the paintings the old Elder Hu had adorned his walls with took on an eerier aspect in the half-light. Stylized waves were dyed a bloody rust, the most innocuous of portraits grinned like demons in the dark.

I liked it. It felt congruent, that my home should feel like a prison decorated by a gay monster. It fit my frustration like a glove, letting me wallow in the mood.

This investigation was a clusterfuck. There was no structure, no professionalism, beyond what I had injected into the process. And what a sorry effort that was. I’d gotten my hands on a full roster of the outer sect after I’d already finished interviews for the day, and I hadn’t even gotten everyone in the complexes closest to the training fields. Even delegating the work there had simply been too many disciples to give each more than a cursory interview, to say nothing of the dozens we’d missed because they were ‘out’ and neither their neighbors nor the administrative hall had the faintest idea where they were.

Two ideas had been running through my head, as I ran about the sect conducting my half baked investigation. What could a modern man notice that an elder accustomed to this world wouldn’t? And what could I see with elder Hu's senses, discover by leveraging by unique advantages?

The answer appeared to be absolutely nothing. Nothing of value at least.

There was simply too little information, and too much that did not add up.

What I knew for fact scarcely filled up scarcely three lines of characters. What I suspected strongly enough to rely upon barely a page. My unanswered questions sprawled across two whole pages.

I knew there had been nothing so prosaic as fingerprints in the blood. I’d checked, exhaustively, before allowing the body to be moved. Elder Shi had been insistent that every drop at the scene had belonged to the victim, so there was no way to use Elder Liang’s techniques to find the culprit through that connection.

Elder Hu’s sword sense had been useless. I’d spent hours lingering in Elder Shi’s morgue, attempting a sort of rudimentary psychometry. I had felt the impression of the weapon that had killed Disciple Chang. But it felt… It felt like the Gray Honda Civic of swords. It was a weapon. It’d been used to kill, but not too many people. It was well made, but not remarkable. It had no magical properties or elemental affinity.

The only useful thing I could tell was that it was a sword, not a saber. That still left my ideal suspect looking like a full third of our outer disciple’s daily carry. I just might be able to pick the weapon out of a lineup, but I definitely couldn’t identify it from any other being carried around the sect.

I knew more than forty people had been within five miles of the victim at the moment of his death. Cultivators had good ears, but that was still an improbable distance for a scream to carry. Dozens of people had instantly given up their peers as being present at the scene, and more than a few had made insinuations about the character of their rivals, how a brutal murder would be just up their alley. Unfortunately, every single one of them had alibis.

Few people came to training fields alone after all. If you wanted to train solo, you did it in the wilds, where there were no prying eyes.

Not a single person had dared make an actual accusation before me. If anyone had actually witnessed the murder, they weren’t coming forward. I could push further there, track down disciples who had been away from home, cross reference group’s stories with each other, but I wasn’t optimistic about actually catching anyone out. There were simply too many suspects, and no guarantee our killer was even among them.

And finally, I knew this whole situation made no sense.

How had the killer known the Sect Master wasn’t watching? There was no way that he’d timed his attack so perfectly by coincidence. Not unless Meng Xiao was spending a lot more time viewing the outside world than his reputation suggested.

How did someone so weak that they wanted the advantage of surprise to kill a disciple four small realms behind Su Li have a technique so godly that Elder Shi thought they could learn from it?

Why had Elder Fan been executed so quickly? How did he have such a soul cultivation technique, when his specialty had been said to be curses?

After helping Elder Shi conduct Chang De’s autopsy, the next thing I’d done was raid the archives. The very first thing I pulled was the official report on Elder Fan’s rampage. It had been written by one Meng Qiuyue, apparently the sectmaster’s disciple or child. I assumed he’d dictated it, being too important to bother filing documents himself.

I had hoped that it would shed some light on the situation.

Unfortunately, the sectmaster’s story had holes in it wide enough to drive a truck through. I hadn’t said anything, because I was not actively suicidal, but plenty about the official version of events didn’t add up. I’d finished reading with even more questions than when I’d begun.

Allegedly, Elder Fan had killed twenty disciples in a short time, using a forbidden technique to devour their souls. It wasn’t specified how many of the victims had their souls removed, but it implied that it was all or most of them. Allegedly, Sect Master Meng Xiao had detected his rampage, and summarily detained and executed him. The report did not provide an official timeline of events.

Few of those details added up.

If Elder Fan’s soul devouring technique required physically removing the heart, how had he done twenty before being stopped? I could probably kill twenty disciples in under a minute, but I doubted I could remove more than two or three of their hearts in that time, let alone perform a presumably complex technique with them.

My current theory was that Meng Xiao had been distracted then too, and took minutes or hours to react.

Which would imply Elder Fan had also possessed a way to know when our resident big brother wasn’t watching. I could see why the Sect Master might want to conceal that.

But why the summary execution with no interrogation? Did covering up the gap in his detection technique merit that? How could the man’s mind be so far gone he didn’t remember teaching that technique to a disciple? Had Meng Xiao even bothered to interrogate him?

The whole thing stunk of the Sect Master wanting to cover up something more significant than a lapse in vigilance.

I was well and thoroughly stumped. Given what I knew, I didn’t see any real effective way to move forward, short of waiting for the killer to strike again.

I groaned, and rubbed my hands across my face. It was still strange, that I didn’t get those little crusty things in the corner of my eyes any more. I grabbed my cup, took a sip of tea, and winced. It was cold.

I wanted a real drink, but spiritual wine fit for a nascent soul cultivator wasn’t something you just swung down to the corner store to pick up.

I’d learned a few more useful things from my trip down to the archives. I did draw an income, but it wasn’t on a schedule, I had to come down to the building to collect it. 400 spirit stones a year, plus a variable payment based on completed missions. The rent on my little house was automatically deducted from the account. I wasn’t sure if twenty five spirit stones a year was extortionate, or a good deal for one of the smallest places in what was considered one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the sect. But it was good to know I could easily get more space, if I wanted to give up a non-trivial fraction of my income.

The whole thing was chronicled in a small book, complete with notations explaining what missions the original Elder Hu had undertaken, and what he was being paid for them. A worrying percentage of those missions were basically marked ‘classified, he knows what he did’, rather than referencing a public report. Looking at the frequency of those classified payments, I could be assigned such a job at any moment, but was almost guaranteed to get one within a year. Another thing to look forward to.

I probably needed to take a normal job soon anyway, the old Elder Hu had taken a publicly posted mission, mostly group escorts and hunting requisitions, every few months.

I sighed. What was I even doing here? I wasn’t qualified to be handling any of this.

I could probably run. This week had revealed a variety of limitations on Meng Xiao’s techniques. He couldn’t watch more than one place at a time. He couldn’t look backwards in time, or track someone only knowing where they had been in the past.

He could teleport within the sect, but I doubted he could do that outside it. It simply didn’t make sense. If someone a realm below immortality could simply be anywhere they wanted in an instant, there would be no way for people like Qin Longwei or the king of the Shan to hold territory.

I could escape, leave all the problems of the sect behind me. To say I was sticking around here for safety, just to survive, would be to lie to myself. Hell, Su Li would probably follow me. I couldn’t even honestly say I was staying for her.

But all the same, I did want to stay here. Not just for my student, the safety of numbers, or the steady income.

If I truly mastered the original Elder Hu’s powers, I would be perhaps the fifth most powerful person in the Pathless Night. I was now relatively certain that my cultivation was somewhere between mid and late nascent soul. Sectmaster Meng and the death cultivator at the gates stood a full realm above me. Elder Shi and Elder Liang had felt within striking distance of my own cultivation, perhaps late and early Nascent Soul respectively. Elder Li and Su had both felt weaker, almost certainly within core formation.

There might be another couple of elders stronger than me, certainly Elder Xin seemed like a contender, from the way even the brash Elder Liang had been polite to him, but it seemed like the majority of them were in core formation.

Could I really change this place, if I built a coalition of elders and disciples with grudges against the status quo? If I wrapped myself in glory from successful missions, brought back powerful corpses for refinement, could Elder Shi be convinced that taking measures to assist and protect our living disciples would yield him stronger corpses in the long run? Could I turn the Sect Master’s apathy to my advantage if I made managing the sect take less work for him? Could I live next to Elder Liang’s harem of dubious origin, and Elder Li’s human skinned puppets?

Were our disciples monsters in the making? Or just outcasts willing to do anything for the chance at clawing their way to a better life?

I had no more idea of the answers to those questions, than I did who killed Chang De.

But all the same, I wanted it. I wanted to change this place for the better, to make it somewhere I could live without hating myself. I wanted all the power and resources Elder Hu was entitled to. I wanted to transform his cultivation into something that suited me. I wanted to surround myself with people I could love and trust, in a home that felt like it deserved the name.

Above all I wanted to be safe, from the threat of losing it all a second time.

But if I wanted to have any chance of making all that happen, I couldn’t start my record off with a loss. I needed to fix this, find this killer, but I couldn’t do it alone. I turned back to yet another of the lists on my desk. The victims of Elder Fan’s original rampage, copied into my own chicken-scratch handwriting. Some things, it appeared, transcended even death.

There. A familiar surname, appearing twice. Elder Liang could help make this possible, if her techniques worked the way I suspected they did. The only question was the angle I approached this from. She was lustful, vengeful, and possessive. She was weaker than Elder Xin and I, but considered herself our social equal. She’d hated the way the Sect Master dismissed her grievances, her dependency upon him for protection.

I could work with that.

Four hours later, I found myself again sitting in Elder Liang’s tea room, the dull orange-pink light of the dawn creeping in through gossamer curtains. For all Fang Xiao’s desire to avoid publicly tying himself to me, he was remarkably adept at acting as a go-between. When I’d asked him to arrange a meeting between the three of us, he’d gotten back to me with a confirmed time in less than half an hour.

I was pretty sure Liang Tao was his go-between with Elder Liang, but I wondered if he approached Elder Li personally.

Elder Xin was missing this time, but otherwise it was the same group I’d met with a few weeks ago. Three elders, and Liang Tao to serve us tea.

I wondered if he considered the duty an honor, or a curse. I shivered. I would have talked back a lot less as a teenager, if my own mother had been capable of slaughtering a hundred grown men without breaking a sweat.

Elder Li sat to my side, visibly frustrated.

“I hope, Elder Hu, that having taken the time to call us together, you have something more than wild rumors to share.”

“I must admit some measure of disappointment, with the amount of information I was able to gather. If you were more successful, perhaps you would like to share your conclusions first?” I said, punctuating my invitation with a sip of tea. It was a white blend this time, with hints of orange and rose.

Elder Li grimaced like he’d bit into a lemon.

“Elder Xin proved unable to provide any further information. Due to the manner of his death, Chang De left no ghost behind that might be interrogated.”

“Of course he didn’t. I told all of you, no soul means no karmic connections, no ghosts.” Elder Liang cut in, her tone acid. “Please, tell us something we don’t already know.”

“Well, I’m sure Elder Hu has some more information for us.” He demurred.

I pulled two sheafs of paper from my ring, passing one to each of my peers.

“I took the liberty of compiling my findings into a short report. I’ve included the results of Elder Shi’s examination of the body as well. To summarize, more than forty disciples were present within five miles of the scene at the time of Chang De’s death. None of them claim to have seen the murder itself. All of them claim to have been training with at least one other disciple at the time of the killing.”

I continued speaking, as the two elders leafed through the report. I’d taken the liberty of omitting a few factors, such as Elder Shi’s musings about the other potential applications of the killer’s technique. I’d also refrained from directly stating anything about the killer’s clear awareness of our Sect Master’s blind spots.

“So, we have a long list of suspects, and know no details about the killer that doesn’t fit a large fraction of the outer sect.” Elder Li said, unimpressed.

“I’m not optimistic our killer is even on that list.” I added. “The training grounds are not well secured, with no elders present, it would be trivial to approach them from within the treeline without being detected.”

“So for all the reams of paper you and Elder Shi produced, you’ve gotten no closer to finding who killed Chang De.”

Elder Liang frowned.

“I suppose I’ll just have to see to the safety of my own clan. I suppose it was too much to expect any better.”

“That is an option. We could bunker down, and each see to our own houses.” I agreed mildly. “But I would prefer to take a more proactive approach.”

“And what, exactly, do you mean by that?” Elder Liang ground out through gritted teeth. “Your investigation has proved itself just as fruitless as our Sect Master’s vaunted vision.”

“Our honored Sect Master clearly has better things to do than worry about so lowly a killer. I do not see any reason to further trouble him with the matter, when we could handle it ourselves.”

There was an intake of breath, from both my peers, as I strayed so close to directly criticizing the Sect Master. I really hoped my read of him was accurate, if he was listening in. Elder Liang’s eyes locked on my own, her surprise clearly visible. It appeared that Elder Hu was indeed known to be in the Sect Master’s camp politically.

“My own skills are hardly suited to this sort of subterfuge.” I continued. “But Elder Shi and I don’t think that this killer is going to stop at one soul. I see no reason why we shouldn’t be better prepared for the next time he strikes. I don’t have any technique that would allow me to identify that a disciple was being attacked, or where they currently were. However…”

I let the thought trail off, hoping they would take it up. Elder Li’s eyes widened.

“You want to use our students as bait.”

“No, I don’t think this killer will be as brazen as Elder Fan.” I said. “I don’t think he’s going to target any of our direct disciples, even if he can overcome their superior cultivation, he would expect them to have life-saving treasures, or a way to alert their masters.

“I want to use random outer disciples with no public connection to any of us as bait. I want to seed as many poisoned fruits as we possibly can throughout the outer sect. So that the next time this fool tries to take what is ours, he chokes on it.” I finished.

“And so you come to me.” Elder Liang said slowly. “Because I would know the moment a fool dared to lay hands upon a member of my clan.”

“In this, your skills far outstrip my own. I am not too proud to beg aid when my talents are insufficient to the task at hand.” I said shamelessly.

She smiled at the recognition. Then her face darkened.

“Fan Xiaotong took Yan’er from me. Took her child from me.”

“If we are to handle apprehending this killer ourselves, I see no reason why we should not handle his punishment as well.” I said, answering her unspoken question. It would be difficult, appeasing both her bloodlust and Elder Shi’s curiosity, but I would burn that bridge when I got to it.

“Elder Fan took what was mine.” Elder Liang said slowly, venom dripping from every word. “He could have suffered a hundred deaths and it would not have repaid what I am owed. I will see every trace of his lineage scoured from the earth.

“A stone perhaps?” She muttered to herself. “No, a thread would be easier. One made two, but bound together still.”

Elder Li watched me carefully, his customary scorn replaced by a wary curiosity. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that meant his opinion was moving in a positive direction. No, he’d simply now marked me as dangerous in a different sort of way.

“You will have your trinkets, Elder Hu. We will seed your poisoned apples, and you will deliver Elder Fan’s misbegotten disciple to my care.

“And when I am done with him, he will beg for the oblivion his master inflicted upon my daughter.”